Trump may either be a lunatic or genius, but he is the only world leader with a plan to change the fate of Gaza – Firstpost

It has been exhausting. Donald Trump’s second stint at the White House has been particularly brutal. The information overload is real, even for an Indian sitting in India.

It has not been even a month that Trump entered the Oval Office as America’s 47th president. He is working at breakneck speed, signing a flurry of executive orders to deliver on core campaign promises in an urgency unheard of, displaying relentless political will. Something is different this time. It is evident to both Trump’s supporters and detractors.

Perhaps the bullet that missed Trump by a whisker will end up altering the course of history. Trump is acting and sounding like a man possessed. It appears as if he has a very clear idea what to do in the limited amount of time that he has.

So overwhelming has been Trump’s spate of actions that even anti-Trump media has been forced to admit his accomplishments. In the words of Trump and his supporters, he is just ‘winning and winning and winning’. In the words of White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt to Fox News, “there is so much winning out of the Trump White House that the mainstream legacy media can’t keep up with it.”

That means someone’s losing. Trump’s domestic agenda, especially the Elon Musk-spearheaded effort to cut the rogue Deep State to size, has stirred a hornet’s nest. The targeting of USAID — a foreign interference tool in the garb of an ‘aid agency’ whose tentacles reach far, deep and wide — has sent a pack of very angry Democrats reeling, and thousands of shadowy perma-bureaucracy elements on anti-depressants.

Yet that’s small change compared to Trump’s geopolitical moves that are sending shockwaves throughout the world. Trump is overturning entire diplomatic and geopolitical paradigms, challenging the legitimacy of notions established since the Second World War. Long-held positions are falling like nine-pins but perhaps none so more than his plan to take “ownership” of Gaza and turn it into a “Riviera of Middle East”.

The plan is either outlandish or a stroke of genius, depending on whom you ask. The details are sketchy. What we do know is that it proposes a radical rethinking of America’s Middle Eastern policy that sounds both ludicrous and audacious. It was delivered in characteristic Trumpian fashion, during a joint presser with Benjamin Netanyahu, and it seemed to take even the Israeli prime minister by surprise as much as it did his top aides and Middle East handlers.

But that’s not a reason to run the idea down. One of the frequent mistakes people do in assessing Trump is mixing up the sublime and the ridiculous. Trump’s unorthodox approach and easy mobility between the twin avenues of sublimity and ridiculousness often blinds us to the reality. Trump has an innate ability to grasp the nub of even a complicated issue, but we tend to overlook that facet of his character owing to his egotism, vaunting and vulnerability to flattery.

Since surviving multiple assassination attempts Trump has been possessed by an odd surefootedness that perhaps lends him to believe that he has been given a fresh lease of life to fulfil a few objectives, and only he possesses the smarts and the daring to find lasting solutions to intractable problems. This could be a dangerous delusion, but it leads Trump to places where other world leaders fear to tread.

Take his Gaza plan. Shorn of hyper-reactive interpretation, the crux of it is trying to change the fate of Middle East by trying something new, because the craziest thing is not to think out of the box but to keep doing the same thing over and over again and somehow expecting to arrive at different outcomes.

I am not saying that Trump’s plan will work. Far from it. There are enough legal and humanitarian hurdles, geopolitical complications, regional obstructionism (some of it justifiable and justiciable), logistical issues and lack of historical precedents to suggest that implementing the plan would be next to impossible.

How can two million people, who are unwilling to be displaced, be forcibly removed and sent to other countries who are bitterly reluctant to accept them even if to ‘develop’ the place? There are other issues as well. If the Gazans are unwilling to leave, forced displacement of civilians would violate Geneva Convention and amount to a crime under international law.

There is also a swirl of confusion around Trump’s plan. The US president initially said that America will take over the Gaza Strip, adopt ownership of the enclave, dismantle “the dangerous unexploded bombs and other weapons on the site, level the site and get rid of the destroyed buildings” and “create an economic development that will supply unlimited numbers of jobs and housing for the people of the area … do a real job, do something different.”

Trump claimed that it “wasn’t a decision made lightly” and the world can’t go back. “If you go back, it’s going to end up the same way it has for 100 years.” His idea of the redeveloped enclave contains Palestinians who would be given “good, fresh, beautiful piece of land” to live “with homes and safety” and in his mind, the “only reason the Palestinians want to go back to Gaza is they have no alternative. It’s right now a demolition site.”

While this suggests a temporary dislocation for Gazans, in his multiple iteration of the plan, Trump has also floated the suggestion of Egypt and Jordan taking in more people, suggesting permanent displacement. While his administration has since walked back the suggestion, claiming that the president was talking about a “temporary relocation” for the rebuilding process, Netanyahu, the other half of the puzzle, has indulged in equivocation, saying that “Gazans can leave, they can then come back. They can relocate and come back.”

In a subsequent interview with a Hebrew language outlet, Netanyahu seemed to railing against the two-state solution,
arguing that a Palestinian state after the October 7 attack would be a ‘reward for terrorism’.

Matters became slightly clearer Thursday when Trump declared on his social media platform, Truth Social, that “The Gaza Strip would be turned over to the United States by Israel at the conclusion of fighting.” He also elaborated on his plan, clarifying that America won’t put boots on the ground but “would work with great development teams from all over the World”, and “slowly and carefully begin the construction of what would become one of the greatest and most spectacular developments of its kind on Earth.” He imagines it would bring stability but stopped short of indicating whether the US would pick up at least part of the tab.

One large piece of the puzzle still exists, however. None of this would be possible if Gazans cannot be persuaded to leave. That seems an impossibility. There are several reasons for this. The Middle East quagmire, of which Israel-Palestine is the vortex in the middle, owes a lot of its complications to the fact it is hard to separate performative outrage from genuine grief. Perennial victimhood allows the thriving of Islamist radicalism, terrorism and a rentier economy.

Gaza is “a living hell that somehow gets even worse by the day”, as the UN secretary general put it last September.

Antonio Guterres was requesting the world to save the people of Gaza from hell. “Two million Palestinians are now crammed into a space the size of the Shanghai International Airport. Existing — not living, but existing — among lakes of sewage, piles of rubbish and mountains of rubble. The only certainty they have is that tomorrow will be worse.”

Kindly explain to me how a plan that seeks to rescue Palestinian refugees from a “living hell” to give them a better chance at life becomes a “wholesale destruction of Gaza aimed at permanently removing its Palestinian population,” ran the hundredth
Al Jazeera narrative.

According to New York City-based Human Rights Watch, nearly “
2.3 million Palestinians are trapped in Gaza”, among whom “more than 80 per cent are refugees, people who were expelled or fled in 1948 from what is now Israel and their descendants, in what Palestinians call the Nakba, the catastrophe” and they have the “right to flee”.

Yet the same, uninhabitable strip of land filled with piles of garbage, tons and tons of concrete rubble where there is no food, water or even hope, suddenly becomes “
home” from where the Palestinian refugees are vowing not to leave, “even if it costs us our souls”.

Did Trump accidentally solve the Palestinian refugee problem? He is certainly refusing to play by the rules set by Hamas whose survival depends on the rentier economy and eternal intifada.

Michael Oren gets it right in The Free Press where he writes, “For Trump today, the core problem in the Middle East is not the absence of a fantasized state for the Palestinians, but the presence of a Palestinian population condemned to pursue conflict, both by their socioeconomic circumstances and by their addiction to a victimhood narrative.”

On of the biggest impediments to that development is the Western groupthink on Gaza that aids and abets the poisonous stasis. The western liberal establishment, that acts as a force multiplier for jihadists, has convinced itself that Gazans are destined to wallow amid ruins, corpses, and explosives, reimagining of the structural problem is out of the curriculum and even recognition of the true nature of the problem is not feasible. Every Gazan life is an expendable ammo for furthering the intifada cause.

Not surprisingly, these ‘humanitarian experts’ have lashed out at Trump as a ‘real estate developer’ thoroughly out of his depth, whose idea of Gaza reconstruction is ‘ethnic cleansing’. These ‘experts’ are profiteers from the rentier economy that sustains the poisonous stasis. Trump may be out of depth, but that does not absolve this class of its complicity in the suffering of the civilians. Though you wouldn’t be able to guess it from their moral superiority.

Trump has reimagined the Israeli-Palestine conflict as an economic problem, and he reckons that Gaza’s reconstruction will force the Arab world to come around. His plan may spark another humanitarian crisis and cause a major displacement of people who are already refugees in the enclave, but it gives the Gazans at least an opportunity to emerge out of perennial victimhood. Trump may fail, and fail miserably. He may even get disinterested at some point if it doesn’t work. But right now, he is the only world leader with a plan, armed with a pigheaded belief in his own ability to make it work.

The writer is Deputy Executive Editor, Firstpost. He tweets as @sreemoytalukdar. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.